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The task was to put together a compilation of music that represented my novel, Peep Show. The man at my publisher would mail the music to his associates, along with a copy of my book. For texture, I assumed. So I did it and then another person at my publisher said you’ve been invited to write about the compilation for a music blog so would you mind writing about your decisions to choose these songs. So I wrote this:

There’s a texture here in New Orleans. What is it? The porch of an old southern home with three generations of family members including great-granddad whose cheeks are sallow as he lifts his harmonica to his lips and begins to tap his foot. And look at all those little ones swinging themselves around the pillars that were built around the time of this country’s Civil War. Today they sell their patch of lawn for parking because it seems the whole world has arrived for another Jazzfest, a holiday rooted in a spiritual swirl of history where the birth of rock & roll and a language called Jazz can be celebrated in great earnest without ever mentioning the name Jesus Christ, unless you want to. The fairgrounds is a horseracing track but I’ve only ever seen it used for the festival. So much music on every corner of every space and I can hear a big choir from the Gospel tent as I make my way past the Blues tent on my way to the main stage where Van Morrison, Pearl Jam, Jeff Beck, Galactic, George Porter, The Meters, The Radiators and the Neville Brothers will sooner or later fill the air with American funk, rock and soul. Irma Thomas, the Queen they say of New Orleans, is singing about Katrina but she tells us she no longer cries during the song. It’s been enough time now, she offers, so she just closes her eyes as the intro starts and contemplates, I can see, the words she’s written, the tune, the safer place she’s conjured, so as to sing it with dry eyes. My friends are people I‘ve known for twenty years, there are five of us and we’ve been here before together. Our closeness is unconditional, our memories rooted in childhood. We are a clique, all of us father’s, all of us centered enough to express how much we need each other in an unpredictable world. When I remove myself briefly from the musical zone I spin in, I see them, each of them, and I know that the precious ingredients at work here are as much about them as any of it. Surrounded, we are, by thousands more, we cannot stop grinning as we sway or hop or dance in small circles in a far-off state of mind that is somehow and strangely private as well, a personal soundtrack. The music is loud at times, pushing your blood along as you move so there’s not a lot to discuss with the person next to you, unless you find it crucial to lean into him and say, “My God, how did I get here?” How did I extract myself from the routine that is my life and place my body on this plot of land in Louisiana while this amazing musician hands me his words, his rhythms, his instrument. The friend will smile and it’s not just any smile. It’s the kind that says, I know exactly what you’re feeling because I’m feeling it too. Our hands might grip, a warm pat on the back. We’re here and we’re listening and we know where we’re heading after this show and after the next and after our soft-shell-crab Po boy and that cold light beer and bucket o’ craw fish. We’re heading just around the bend. You can see it. We’re heading for more music.

Just got back from a Vampire Weekend show at the Fox Theatre in
Oakland. The venue is a gorgeous 1920’s built, 2,800 seater that must
have been renovated in recent years but kept righteously close to its
original form. The band is made up of five Columbia University grads
who are meshing Ska with punk with Surfer-movie-guitar with minor-
league-hockey-game-organ with the intelligence of five musicians who
were smart enough to go to Columbia and driven enough to play a lot
together while spewing “can’t stop my leg” beats that end really
abruptly and make you want to clap really hard. As I stood there,
trying but failing to stop my leg, I thought about the current state
of rock and how interesting it is that a group of handsome yet very un-
rocker-looking gentleman are owning the stage so well and gyrating
perfectly to the music that comes straight from their, well, 20-
something histories on this planet. Lives that is, which began while I
was a freshman, maybe a sophomore at NYU, hearing about something
called e-mail that allowed you to communicate in written bursts if you
could find a computer. I got lost in the band’s reggae influenced
songs that reminded me of the kind of music that works in perfect tune
with Wes Anderson montage previews, where the cast is announced by
that guy with the God-like voice while the hope and hop of life-
affirming-music plays us through sublime glimpses of the film. “Bill
Murray…Jason Schwartzman…Lilly Tomlin….And Owen Wilson, as the kid who
comes from wealth but went nuts in his New Hampshire boarding school
while wearing white turtlenecks and pursing his lips. Behind the
band, just under five, large crystal chandeliers was their album
cover, a close-up of a blond girl with the words Vampire Weekend over
her head. Her face did not leave us for the entire show and at times
her eyes lit like Satan’s and I became positive that every word I was
hearing was rooted in one horrific weekend. There was no doubt that
this hot blond chick whose cheekbones and wide-set eyes made her ideal
for any casting-call in search of the rich, mean girl who puts out,
was representative of a near-death relationship with our singer. She
was there, I decided, to tell everyone who might not know, that yes,
due to her appearance and innately vicious sensuality, that she was
once very successful in utterly destroying this heterosexual suburban-
American dude up there, to the extent that he would need to write and
sing and try to blood-let all she left him with…one weekend….a long
time ago. Probably in the early 00’s. Take that, he’s saying, holding
his guitar high to the screaming audience, the strings nearly touching
his ear. “How do you like me now?”

About to really start writing again. Taking a break from the fine art painting I’ve been doing for months and turning the painting studio into a writing office/studio/nook. It will be a place of great positivity and hope…I hope. Flowers are there now. A plant I’ll name Roger. A fish, maybe. I am 50 pages into a new book I’m calling The Flying McGreevys about a family that travels in a Winnebago and performs stunts on motorcycles and various other contraptions to wow the audiences of Americans in the 70’s. It was a time in which a person could jump a motorcycle over a whole bunch of stuff and if he lived, anything was possible. All you had to do was take that risk over and over again. Our protag, Ty McGreevy has a lot going on in his head as he watches his brother become a star and his father a legend. The family “Winny” he gets to jump each night is small and embarrassing and he’s fifteen now for crying out loud, such a small inconsequential jump, but it leaves him a lot of time at night to roam these various fairgrounds and carnivals and freak tents and soon he learns and understands where his brother, and family, are really headed.

Everytime I think about blogging, I
tell myself there’s more productive things to do. Like work. When I blog, I’m
sitting in the same position I am when I’m working so it always seems crazy to
blow an opportunity to work since I’m in the chair and all. I’m currently well
into another novel, believe it or not. Peep
Show my second is done and coming out June 1st 2010. So because
I’m a writer, I need to keep, ya know, writing and I find myself in a coffee
shop in Oakland-ish Berkeley and I got to tell you, I should be working but I’m
not. The untitled novel I’m working on may end up being my best. But of course,
I said that about my last and the one before that, remember, The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green.

November arrives and it’s already the 12th and people are talking of Thanksgiving and even Christmas and I’m trying to figure out what happened to October. Maybe it was the anticipation of the election that made the entire month disappear. I aged during October, yes, I recall that, the candles and the love from my kids and a new turntable from my loving sibling, Dr. John Dorian. Yes, on the 11th I became older than almost every professional athlete that ever played any game ever. Thank you, Jamie Moyer. Thank you for staying older than me. And congrats on a well deserved ring in Philly. It helps that people say Obama is young at 47. Young for the presidency , sure, but can he still do ten pushups? I’ve never once wrote about politics in this blog because I truly hate politics. Yes, I understand the importance of government. It’s one of the perks of procreating – a sudden, and innate need for global peace. But the WWF aspect of what’s required to win an election in America is as petty as a hair-pulling montage on The Best of Jerry Springer. Turns out, if you have nothing to run on, you’re left to attack the other opponent and the reason for this is that until election day, anything remains possible. So many media outlets, so much room for the spin, a Muslim, a swift boat, a toke of weed, plagiarism, Marla Maples on your lap. “Smile!” But, man, is it good to see W. go away or what? Not hell. Just some ranch somewhere, where he can design the Bush library in silence. “I want a dartboard with Obama’s face on it. I mean Osama. I did again, damn!” A lot of people forget that Bush was “the man” when the planes first fell. New Jersey born, I knew three people that perished in 9/11. I remember seeing George when it all went down and thinking, go man, go use all that testosterone and pent up rage you used when you executed nearly all the people in Texas as governor. Go gas up all those jet fighters and tanks and aircraft carriers because the only way to make sense of terrorism is to terrorize right the hell back. Do it for the boy I played little league with in the early eighties who died in the trade center and do it for the woman that told me she had a great book idea just a month before her plane went down in a field in Pennsylvania. And he did, he fired up all the military toys and, well, you’ve seen how it all went down. Frank Rich of the New York Times said that Obama’s win, and I’m paraphrasing, has created the exact optimism and hope that Dick Cheney hoped for in Iraq when the war began. In eight long years, I don’t recall Dick ever promoting anything even close to hope or optimism. Fear was the mantra, and it was sprayed at us relentlessly, for so many years. In fact, when W. had an opportunity to speak after Obama won, his first thoughts were about the vulnerability we as Americans will be prone to as this transition in the white house occurs.

Thought I’d write for either me or
you or anyone that will have me. A Thursday in Oakland, hot out but gorgeous,
just about 11AM, the beginning of September, 2008. Sorry for those of you
waiting for novel two. It will be out there, I promise, and it may be the best
thing I’ve ever written. How couldn’t it be, it’s taking me three lifetimes to
finish. Today I’d like to free-write, for the hell of it, just write about
anything that comes to mind. Tough week for sick kids in my house, blowing
booger shnots all over the place. If I don’t get sick it will be a miracle. The
way my life is set up right now, I’m the go-to parent when one of my two kids
is down for the count. Child two’s
symptoms are a very stuffed nose, half-closed eyelids like Garfield, a fever
that spikes at night and a marked irritability around dinner time. This
culminates in her barking at me and whining and sounding like the kind of lady
that leads men to drink warm whiskey from dirty shot glasses. My wife this week
is in Bejing on business. She is in the mobile gaming industry. Glu Mobile. So I
am solo which means I’ve blown my daughter’s nose 8, 456 times. Our process: I
hold the tissue over her nose and coach her, “Harder, again, nice, again.” I
pinch off the mashed green boogers, hand her another piece of tissue and she wipes the excess because the first
few times I killed her nostrils which are sore from all the blowing. She gave me
the dirtiest look I’ve ever received and we tried again. Now that she’s in
charge we are quite well rehearsed.

We’re having a heat wave in the SF Bay Area. Yeah, it’s muy caliente for F-ing sure. How much sweat can pour from one man’s forehead? A gallon? I must have the most fit forehead in all the land. My forehead could walk the red carpet in Hollywood right now and have no issue being judged negatively by celebrity fashion experts like my former high school classmate, Robert Verdi, who we used to call Bobby. I saw him at my high school reunion in ’06 and he was tall and handsome with no hair and really nice sunglasses perched on his browridge. After we embraced he said I looked like a “heaping lump of dog crap.” No, he didn’t but it would have made for a better story. So it’s been a while since I wrote and I want to say thank you very much to all of you who wrote me or had comments about my novel, The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green. A screen adaptation was written recently and I think it’s very, very good, so the next step is to have more readers weigh in and add notes and all that fun and perhaps one day soon those characters will come to life on screen. Yikes! The nutshell on my current book is that I’m handing it in to my editor at the end of June. The gang will read it and poke at it and my prayers are that I’ll be damn close to finished after that. I love this book I’m writing, I do, I love her/him with all my heart. Books are like babies at first that grow with you and shape themselves over long and sometimes really long periods of your life. This baby was due last year so I’m really ready to push her out. The labor has been a doozy, let me tell you, and I can only see the crown at this point, a blotch of cranium. But don’t worry, the heartbeat is steady, I’ve got plenty of fluids, my support system is intact, mostly because they’ve learned to stop asking me, “how it’s going.” I could probably use a life coach, we all could, unless you are life coach. I need a person who stands behind me in my office and screams, WRITE! in my ear when my mind contemplates going to Youtube to watch dogs fall in bathtubs with infants. WRITE!

A Thursday morning here in the Bay Area of San Francisco. The Oakland hills to be exact. From my view here at my kitchen table I can see that it’s a clear day, even in the frequently foggy city across the bay. It’s been a long time since I wrote anything that wasn’t related to my latest novel. Oh, yes the novel. Where is it? What is it? Is it actually a book or is it a tall stack of papers that say ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JOSHUA A DULL BOY. For those too young for the reference, see The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall. The update on my book is that I finished a draft I was very happy with but my editors at Algonquin felt it needed to be tweaked here and there, very normal, and this tweaking has resulted in some substantial shifting which has put me in a new time bracket for its release. Ya see, books only come out in the fall or spring of any given year. So, the deadline for fall is the previous December and the deadline for spring is the previous June. Don’t ask me why it takes so long to put a finished manuscript into book form, but it does. You wouldn’t believe how much fine-tuning it takes to be actually done. When you read a bad book, if you’ve ever read a bad book, you can sometimes feel that the whole thing has been rushed, the same with bad movies. But when you get things right, even if it takes some time, those are the books that stay on your shelf forever, the kind of books you can’t wait to share with people, the kind of book that still sells, even after the author’s dead and turns to fertilizer. So even if I finished the book tomorrow, it wouldn’t be put through the process of publishing until June. The bottom line is this: This is a horrendous career choice. Until, of course, the book comes out, and it’s great, and people begin comparing you to long dead authors. But anyway, I appreciate all the letters and kind thoughts regarding The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green. I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that you can find my writing in three anthologies right now, the latest is called How To Spell Chanukah, and other holiday dilemmas. And I just agreed to be a part of another one that covers the topic of siblings. But enough about me. How are you? Have you been watching the new TV show called Election 08? It’s the best new reality show out there and so much like American Idol that it’s creepy. Both game shows, one about singing, the other about speech making. Both popularity contests, both watched by millions, both heavily scrutinized by pundits and judges and the public at large. I’d like to see them switch for an episode where you have Mitt Romney singing at a caucus, debating some other Republican through an operatic argument about the issues. Global Waaaaaarming is baaaaaad and we muuuuuust address the fact that the weather is Waaaaacky!!!!! And then the next night you have Kelly Clarkson and Fantasia out on stage for a heated discussion of foreign affairs and exit strategies for Iraq. Now that would be entertaining.

His mother wakes him with the sound of his name. He hears "James" at these times, the tone of a question, like asking if it's really him under his rainbow blanket. He fake sleeps a little and watches her fold his green hooded sweatshirt and a pair of tan corduroys she never remembers he hates. She lays them neatly in an open brown suitcase that smells like the basement, tosses a pair of socks in there too which he'll bring home still folded in a ball. He turns his face away from her on his pillow and picks at the peeling seam of the wall paper; toy soldiers, light blue cannons. Someone else's choice.